In today’s constantly evolving textile and fashion industry, product design decision-making must involve multiple considerations, including aesthetics, functionality and sustainability. As consumer tastes evolve and environmental concerns rise, determining the most suitable design choices is an umbrella process with numerous interrelated factors. The research aims to examine and score criteria for textile product design by structuring them into three broad dimensions: aesthetic, functional and sustainable.
A systematic review of literature was followed to enumerate the distinguishing criteria for every dimension, along with expert consultations in context for validity. Their evaluation was carried out with a formal decision support model, best worst method, which strikes an optimal balance between data economy and comparison consistency.
Functional aspects such as comfort and stamina have the highest weightage, followed by sustainability factors such as use of green materials and recyclability. Aesthetic factors, being as subjective in nature as they are, also emerged to be important, particularly in highly engaging products.
The findings provide theoretical implications by extending current design evaluation models with an encompassing, integrated framework. Managerially, the framework offers designers, product developers and sustainability officers a decision-making tool to map product innovations to market and environmental standards.
The study recognizes the strengths of systematic, criterion-based evaluation of improving competitiveness and customer satisfaction in products. The drawbacks are generalizability and expert judgment subjectivity, but follow-up studies can be executed using real-time consumer knowledge and design adaptation feedback loops. The study helps to bridge the knowledge gap between sustainable innovation and customer-centric design for the textile sector.
